Advertising is the cost of access to the content. The content provider has the user's attention, and the advertiser is paying the content provider for a small slice of that attention. But that's all the cost should be, just a moment of attention. The cost should not be giving up your privacy.
The cost shouldn't even be attention, we have little enough control over the silence of our minds in the modern world - we should fight against all those sources that feel falsely entitled to get a slice of our brains and time for themselves.
There is no implicit link between "stuff on the internet" and advertising, this "free service" isn't free, we're all paying a gateway fee to get into the internet to begin with, then many content providers have judged their content valuable enough to justify asking for payment, with others relying on soft/burst funding sources like crowdsourcing. The internet and most people's sites really aren't so expensive to maintain that we need this level of crazy marketing.
> we should fight against all those sources that feel falsely entitled to get a slice of our brains and time for themselves.
Why are they falsely entitled? You're choosing to give your attention to a site in exchange for its content. That was your choice. The site turns around and sells a tiny slice of your attention to an ad provider in order to actually make money. But make no mistake, this was the attention that you chose to give to the site in exchange for its content, and that site can spend your attention how it wishes. If you don't like how it spends your attention, don't patronize that site anymore.
I reject this analogy, it's like saying "You walked into a supermarket to buy an apple for a dollar, it ended up costing you eight dollars because of taxes and fees and unfortunately those seven extra dollars were spent before you ever got the apple, so I guess the apple still costs a dollar but when you walk out of the store you'll be eight dollars poorer."
Advertising isn't voluntarily entered into by us, it's forced on the consumer. Personally I try to avoid patronizing sites that use heavy advertising (except interesting articles forwarded to me) but I am more speaking on the harm to us all. I suppose I could reword my comment above a bit more accurately to "I reject the normalization of advertising in society."
